A Difference of Direction
by Subtext
Summary: Some coping skills are more finely honed than others when you have all the time in the world to learn them. Post-Inuyasha series AU, Dark One-Shot for now.
1. Where You End and I Begin

The girl from the future is now the girl from the past; she is forced to press on past the old present.

For her there have never been endings, only bare beginnings.

She turns the corner.

Kagome walks forward to work and wishes she could walk back. She is a buyer in Tokyo now, all business, all of thirty years old and feeling fifteen.

She passes a café, a newsstand, a bus stop; she had long ago passed a hanyou, a houshi, and a taijaya.

The primly dressed woman shakes her head and hopes her hair stays bound in its chignon. Stray hair escapes, like stray thoughts, and both are equally disorganized.

The city is toneless grays, sharp glass and dark hair.

The _tap_, _tap_, _tap_, of her heels on the concrete sidewalk mark her journey like a mocking metronome. Throngs of people brush by her, a sea of faces, a slideshow of reminders. Inuyasha's nose is on one man for a fleeting moment before he buries it again behind a newspaper.

Sango's serious eyes are on a teenaged schoolgirl late for class; they shift to Kagome for a second, but there is no recognition there.

Miroku is found in a convenience store clerk; he flirts with a girl at the counter and asks her to bear in mind his good points.

A shock of red hair taints her peripheral vision and she feels her bleeding heart drip dry with the last drop.

She turns her head slightly. The others are ghosts, apparitions from a microcosm in which time did not matter and change was only the cycle of the sun and seasons.

This one proves different.

He passes on in the opposite direction, as if he knows the secret to going backward. He is aged but ageless, grown but forever teetering on the edge of a decline that will never come.

His green eyes are the same; memories of a demon's forest float through her mind, and she wildly wonders if her hair is coming undone.

They meet at a pivotal point and brush shoulders, his navy blue Armani suit crumpling against her gray tweed suit jacket. They pause, side-by-side and aligned like they used to be.

One looks reluctantly forward and the other looks back, or maybe direction is relative and they are both looking back in different ways.

A moment is set aside in time, parallel universes and parallel bodies sharing a match of memory.

Kagome is glad to see he is tall and grown and still alive. Unlike him, she is bent with the weight of lost years, her fate sealed with the well that repeatedly refused her entry.

Kagome's breath hitches, and she smiles.

She feels him inhale deeply beside her. He knows.

The businesswoman finds herself standing a little straighter.

The people of Tokyo sweep past them, unaware of the universe expanding and contracting around them on a spec of sidewalk.

No longer is there the desolate urban decay; Kagome notices the bright creep of greenery in a sidewalk crack a step ahead of her.

_Maybe_, she thinks desperately, _maybe this time will be different_.

The two remain connected by the contact of shoulders; each half of a magnet pulled together by shared experiences and common knowledge.

"Where have you been?" she accuses, her contralto radiating between amazement and sadness.

He merely twists his head on his shoulders, shaking it. She feels his body shake, too.

Together they are a quivering mass of nerves and unfinished endings.

He refuses to look at her; to do so would be to acknowledge her fading countenance, the wear of her years. He appears younger, even though he is much older, but she is human.

She will die.

He does not know she already did, years ago and down a dark well through a portal her mind lies –

"_Shippou-chan_," she whispers. It is nearly drowned out by the blare of a horn, but he hears her, his heightened senses still acute. He has heard her voice many times throughout the centuries.

He finds the courage to speak, finally, and his voice reverts to a childlike tenor that makes Kagome want to weep.

"Do not cry, Kagome-chan", he replies, sensing the crack in her countenance. There are many cracks, too many to patch, rippling through time and earth and out the other side of the Bone Eater's well.

The other side, where she could not follow. Her body was rooted in the physical world still, much like Goshinboku.

Like Goshinboku, she was a sentinel in the stream of time - she was alone.

Until now.

"Where..?" she begins, because that is all fate gives her. Beginnings and unfinished, unsatisfactory outcomes that birth new pain.

It is a vicious cycle of cruel beginnings without end.

Shippou, however, knows only endings.

His youth and inexperience was a poor primer for the terminations; the disappearance of Kagome after the Shikon no Tama was completed, the premature death of Sango in childbirth, and Miroku to physical decay. Inuyasha wound up with Kikyou, restored by Kagome's selfless wish. Kikyou repaid that kindness by killing Inuyasha, her flesh and blood body still a clay corpse in mind.

Shippou remained, no, persisted; he counted death as the final demarcation before the next finale.

There was always another ending, another way to mark the callous clock.

This was not one of them. It is an aberration to the only pattern he knows.

He cannot stomach it.

"Goodbye, Kagome-chan," he soothes gruffly, his voice now deep. The demon lives with the knowledge that this will not be the last time he utters those words. This is merely a brief intermission before Kagome's final act.

He takes a single step forward, ready to leave. He is good at that.

The girl from the past gasps and turns in time to see Shippou's departing back. A low, red ponytail still hangs from the nape of his neck. It is longer now, grown out within the lost years.

"Why?" she calls, her voice lost in the din of the crowd, in the passages of time. She sounds all of fifteen again, abandoned and betrayed. Another question, another ragged and seeping wound that will not close.

Shippou hears but does not reply. He will find her again one day, when she is near her true end and reeking of puréed food and festering bed sores. He can do no less.

He is an expert at endings, after all.

Kagome watches him disappear, just like she did long ago, so maybe it is only fair.

With glassy eyes and unkempt hair she continues on to work and reaches the beginning of an intersection and the end of a city block.

For her there have never been endings, only bare beginnings.

She turns the corner.


	2. Author's Note

**A/N:** I forgot to add this to the original story, so I'm doing it now. This story was inspired by Linkin Park's Roads Untraveled song. A thought popped into my head: what is Kagome moved on with her life, got a job, and was unable to return to the past? What if everyone she knew was dead, except for Shippou (I suppose Sesshoumaru would still be out there somewhere, too). What if they met at a busy junction in Tokyo, seemingly at random one day?

I took what I knew Shippou would have experienced if a lot of bad things happened to him. I took what Kagome would know… put them together and Shippou can't deal with seeing Kagome again just yet. Not only that, his rejection of her is actually accepted somewhat easily because of the guilt she feels for abandoning him in the first place.

This is a really dour look at how such a fleeting meeting (I rhyme, nice) could go so wrong. I just had to explain it better.

I may have her meet Sesshoumaru next in another random scenario, or have her meet Shippou for the final time when she is old and gray, so this may not actually be a one-shot after all. Cheers!


End file.
